U.N. Envoy Is Seeking a Deal to Oust Assad From Syria

In the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Thursday, a wounded rebel fighter lay in the back of a pickup truck making its way through traffic to a hospital.Credit
Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

DUBLIN — With the support of the United States, the United Nations special envoy on Syria is mounting a diplomatic push for a brokered agreement that would lead to the ouster of the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and the installation of a transitional government.

The envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, convened an unusual three-way meeting on Thursday night at a Dublin hotel with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov.

After the 40-minute meeting, Mr. Brahimi said his goal was to “put together a peace process” that would build on discussions that the United States and Russia had in June but which quickly collapsed.

Mr. Brahimi and senior American and Russian officials plan to meet again in several days to see if they can agree on specifics of a negotiating approach that might end the 20-month conflict, which has killed more than 40,000 Syrians.

With Mr. Assad’s fortunes looking bleaker and persistent worries that the Syrian leader is considering using his chemical arsenal, the hope on the American side was that the Russians might throw their weight behind Mr. Brahimi’s effort.

“Events on the ground in Syria are accelerating, and we see that in many different ways,” Mrs. Clinton said before the meeting, alluding to reports on chemical weapons developments. “The pressure against the regime in and around Damascus appears to be increasing.”

The United States is in a race to prevent the military developments in Syria from outpacing the nascent arrangements for a political transition. But daunting questions remain, including the possibility that the Russian position has not fundamentally shifted and the absence of any indication that Assad government loyalists and the Syrian opposition are interested in negotiating a transitional arrangement with each other.

“The longer Syrian violence continues, the more extremists benefit,” the American ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, said in remarks at a Washington event organized by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a nongovernment group.

The goal of the United States is to cobble together an answer to the “day after” questions. That is, who would govern Syria if Mr. Assad were finally deposed? And how can the international community reduce the risk of a downward spiraling sectarian and ethnic bloodletting that might spill over Syria’s border and enable radical Islamists to emerge as a potent political force?

Each of the several elements to the American strategy is challenging in its own right, and they require synchronization in the weeks ahead.

Photo

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, right, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Organization for Security and Economic Cooperation conference in Dublin.Credit
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

The United States is trying to shape and broaden the Syrian opposition so that it can play a major role in a political transition should Mr. Assad be driven from power. Mrs. Clinton has hinted that the United States will recognize the Syrian opposition as the legitimate political representative of the Syrian people at a meeting next week in Marrakesh, Morocco — assuming that the opposition continues to flesh out its organization and political structure.

Britain, France, Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council have already formally recognized the group.

Recognition by the United States would be more than symbolic. The hope is that the group becomes a mechanism for channeling aid inside Syria and governing territory that it liberates from the Assad government.

“For the first time, there is a national opposition leadership,” Mr. Ford asserted in his appearance on Thursday. “Finally, people on the inside are working with those on the outside.”

The United States is also moving to designate the Nusra Front as an international terrorist organization, a move that has pros and cons since the group is made up of some of the most experienced fighters against the Assad government. But the United States wants to isolate the group politically from the rest of the opposition during a transition, because the front is seen by experts as affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Lastly, the Obama administration is trying to get the Russians on board to revive last June’s Geneva discussions with them and the United Nations that collapsed. The United States had thought those talks would lead to Mr. Assad’s relinquishing power and a United Nations Security Council resolution threatening economic sanctions and, in theory, military action under Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter, but the Russians later interpreted the talks differently.

Forging a common American and Russian position, American officials believe, would leave Iran as the only major international supporter of the Assad government and encourage government loyalists to abandon Mr. Assad.

The focus of Thursday night’s talks, which took place on the margins of a meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, was, Mr. Brahimi said, how “to put together a peace process that will be based on Geneva.”

“We haven’t taken any sensational decisions,” he added. After the talks ended, Mr. Lavrov caught a flight to Moscow, presumably to brief President Vladimir V. Putin and plan Moscow’s next moves. Russia has cast its support for Mr. Assad as a principled stand against Western-led interventions in the region. But Russian officials now appear to be thinking more seriously about a transition.

A lawmaker with the dominant party, United Russia, told visiting British legislators on Thursday that although Russia wants to see the Assad government rule effectively, “time shows that this task is beyond its strength.”

Russia is also eager to protect its strategic interests in Syria, fading traces of the Soviet Union’s strong foothold in the Middle East. In talks with opposition figures, officials have raised the issue of its modest naval facility at the port of Tartus, Russia’s last military base outside the former Soviet Union. It is almost certainly eager to continue its defense contracts with Damascus because their loss would hurt important players in the defense industry who have already been battered by the Arab uprisings.

Because Russia has few lines of communication with the rebel groups now in the forefront of fighting in Syria, as discussions of a transitional arrangement begin, it hopes to increase the role of the domestic opposition groups it has strong ties with, analysts here said.

And on Monday came the first official statement about helping Russian citizens leave Syria — a nearly impossible task, since tens of thousands of Russian women have married into Syrian families and are scattered with their children throughout the country.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Dublin, and Ellen Barry from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on December 7, 2012, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: U.N. Envoy Is Seeking a Deal to Oust Assad From Syria. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe